Posts made in June, 2012

Every time I look around, I see something new that I should be doing. Today it was clean eating. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been sort of playing around with it for a while now, but I’m still consuming processed stuff too. It’s easier with our meals to eat veg and meat and grains that aren’t processed. It’s mostly how we were already eating, but there have always been those quick meals that don’t take any thought and don’t have very much nutritional value (think processed noodles in some kind of fake cream sauce with garlic that I could toss tuna into and serve with…wait for it….potato chips). I know. I know. It’s trash food. It’s not real, but it’s easy and it’s tasty (because it’s packed with addictive chemicals in it that will make you crave for it nightly). But I don’t want to eat that way and I know it’s a good portion of what is wrong with ‘merica or Amercia.

So clean eating had my attention today. Don’t get me wrong, we had processed bread at one point and graham crackers with jello pudding and cool whip for dessert. It was not a day of clean eating. It was a day of THINKING about clean eating. See the difference? Yes, yes, I’m sure you do.

And I thought about how I need to be weight lifting, but I didn’t actually lift any weights. I climbed 2.4 miles of stairs, but I didn’t lift a weight, just a baby and a three year old.

And I thought about buying some curriculum so that I can teach my oldest how to read good and stuff. I did (FINALLY!) make a purchase to help us with the learning for next year. It had free shipping. I really liked that part and the answer they gave to a person’s question on their facebook page (Basically: My kid has Aspergers and is struggling to write well. What curriculum do I need to help him? Answer: Why does your kid need to stress out about handwriting? Have you thought about helping him type and learn to love express himself in story form without worrying about forming letters? [I may have shed a few tears over this, I thought it was so fantastic]). It will be here some time and then I’ll tell you about it, if you promise not to tell me that this is the worst purchase I’ve ever made.

And I thought about putting one of the kids into speech therapy. We’re struggling with the sound of Ls and Ws and my goodness is that a stressful idea for me (He’ll get an IEP?! What?! It’s just speech therapy. I went through speech therapy…wait…did I have an IEP? Oh, probably not. Nobody did that back then. They just sent you to a special room near the principal and kind of freaked you out like you were in trouble for your Kindergarten year).

There are too many good things that I need to eventually accomplish and too many good things that are just not going to happen (see: flossing daily and keeping my vehicle clean). It’s sometimes incredibly hard to figure out which good things need priority, but it’s not hard to know right now. Good night.

This post goes out to all my friends raised in the 80s by parents just like mine. Alas, it was a different era.

After taking all three minors to the splash park today and surviving (although I did use that brief lightening strike and clap of thunder to make them hurry up FOR REAL), we went for lunch at my parents’ house. Potstickers, egg rolls and spicy fried rice consumed and dishes were being done when I mentioned how certifiably insane it feels to take three kids out in public, which made us all remember that one time in Hawaii.

Back when I was five…

I was five when my dad managed a work center that included a woman who was, in the truest sense of the word, certifiable. They’d known she was nuts since the time she laughed like a crazy witch in the middle of a military emergency action message. That message was disregarded. She was transferred to a different work center, one that didn’t involve top secret data.

The new work center was great for parties, though, complete with barbecue pits and horseshoes and the standards were just a bit more lax. Just a bit. One Saturday, all the families were out for a party. It was hot out and we weren’t at the beach, so I wanted to cool off. Sitting inside the work center was perfect – plenty of paper and writing utensils while the air conditioner hummed away. Perfect save one detail – the insane woman was working.

I came running out of the building, straight to my dad and said “That crazy lady in there is talking to herself.” Trying to reassure me, he reminded me that she was on the radio, but I cut him off, “Daddy, I know what radio talk sounds like and she’s not talking on the radio!” Laughter started to roll around the party as the adults sneaked back in to find the woman talking to herself and repeatedly pressing down a button that made the paper feed shoot the paper up into the air and then gather in a heap of ribbon-ed mess on the ground.

Remembering the story together and thinking about leaving my own kid alone with a nut job while I barbecued outside made me ask my parents why they would ever leave me alone with somebody like that. They laughed and shrugged their shoulders and reminded me that I was hot and it solved my immediate problem. They were right, of course, and I wasn’t in any immediate danger or anything, but really?! It’s a pretty hilarious memory now.

What about you? Did your parents allow stuff that you’d never let your kids do? Or, were they too involved and now you’re super lenient with yours? Is this the normal ebb and flow of parenting styles? What’s your take?

Over the past almost two months now, I have been working out nearly every day. I usually take Sundays off, although not always and sometimes I take off Wednesdays, but that can spiral into taking off Thursdays and Fridays too, so Wednesday stakes are a little higher. I had been working out kind of sporadically after receiving the all clear at six weeks postpartum, but I was finding it hard to carve out time and even harder to feel like pushing my still very tired body.

Then a friend texted to say that I should run in this with her:

I immediately texted back that I would not be doing that. I’m nursing. Running seems silly for a chest that is carrying the nourishment for a human. Who wants to run in pain? Plus, I have never run in any kind of official race. That also seems like a foreign idea. People will see me running? They will be running too? Eh. I’ve never really thought of running as a group sport and I’ve never really needed to prove myself, even if it’s only to myself. So, no. No, I would not be doing that race, but I was happy she asked.

And then someone else called me about it and said I would be doing it. I guess she was more persuasive…?…because I signed up while I was still on the phone with her. And then I sort of freaked out because I was not in shape. Not at all. I was mostly flabby as I had sustained myself with whatever I wanted to eat for the past year. Before Greer, I’d been running about 28 miles a week. I’d been in the best shape of my life. But after Greer, the only shape I had was round and slightly dimpled – kind of golf bally. So the freak out was called for, warranted, appropriate.

I told Jud and my parents that I was going to need to get on track and figure out a schedule to whip myself back into shape. Nearly two months later and I’m pretty much there. It’s involved my dad watching the kids in the morning for an hour while I hit the gym. It’s included heading to my parents’ house to run on their treadmill when my dad can’t make it in the morning. I’ve had mornings where I’ve nursed the baby and then headed off to the gym before the sun rose so that Jud could chill with the little people while I climbed stairs or ran. And now, with July just around the corner, I’m ready.

It’s only a 5k, which is what I run three to five times a week, so the distance won’t be an issue, but I’m still a little nervous. How does it all work with all of those people lining up to race at the same time? What about parking? Will my friends and I run together or at our own unique paces? Will it rain and cancel the whole thing? Will it be blazing hot and hard to breathe?

Hard to say how it will all play out, but I’m ready to run and I’m glad my friend called to convince me. Two-ish weeks to go!

The situation I wrote of earlier this month was obviously not permanently solved by the solution offered in that post. The solution to the sibling conflict was to not be around each other. How long can that last, right? About as long as grandparents don’t have to go in to work. What eight hours? And what about if you don’t have grandparents nearby? And what if you have more than two children engaged in the battle? A fallible plan indeed.

Last week, while attending an event that only seemed to bring about great discouragement about mothering, in spite of the best intentions of event planners, I sat in a seat and quietly despaired. My own brother and I had fought mercilessly growing up. We were evil to one another, like the fruits of the devil. Not only did we, I am sure, cause our own mother much grief, we created an air of general unease in our home. I don’t want the same for my kids. I want them to be able to get along. I want them to know how to work together, even if they aren’t really friends. I want our home to filled with peace and for the people in it to give each other grace when disagreements arise. A tall order, for sure, but one that I was beginning to think of as more than just illusive. Perhaps it was impossible.

And yet I knew of homes where things were calmer. How? What was going on there? Were their children more easily tempered? Were their personalities stifled? Were they robots? No. None of these, I was pretty sure [The last time I believed people to be robots was the first grade, when I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the teachers were actual humans who left the building and went home to perform mundane tasks like making dinner and doing laundry. I formed a rather elaborate idea in my brain about a hidden room in the school where the teachers would plug in to recharge for the next day of teaching. Pretty sure this was to blame for that thinking:]

I related the crazy making that was going on to a few women just before quietly succumbing to the desperation. At least I’d asked for help, I figured. At least I was attempting authenticity, even if the root of it was to glean ideas from others. At least.